Silk Sails Read Online Free PDF Page B

misty past.
    To give the reader a better idea of the breadth of women’s involvement in the ship business, below is a list of the various categories I have been able to identify from the records of all five provinces, of England, and of the United States:
    Women as sole owners of ships
    Women as joint owners of ships
    Women designated as co-partners in trade
    Women designated as managing owners of ships
    Women appointing men (husbands) as managing owner
    Men appointing women as managing owner
    Women who bought shares in ships
    Women who inherited shares in ships
    Minors who were designated to inherit shares in ships (often with mothers)
    Women as mortgagees for ships Women who took mortgages
    Women owners who did not have a mortgage but men to whom they sold the ship had to take a mortgage
    Women who inherited ships and sold them within one year or so
    Women who inherited ships and apparently remained active in the business
    Widows who remained in the business after the husband’s death
    Widows who bought ships
    Women appointed as sole executrix of a will
    Women appointed as executresses (i.e. women only)
    Women appointed as administratrixes Women appointed as one executrix among two or more persons
    Women designated as executors
    Women buying insurance on ships
    A woman empowering the captain to sell her ship
    Women dying with a will
    Women dying intestate
    Women naming ships after themselves
    Women’s occupations as designated in the ship registers
    Women’s ships involved in the sealing business
    Women involved in the whaling business
    Married Women owners before 1876 (i.e. before Women’s Property Acts)
    Women selling ships directly to women
    Wives selling to husbands and vice versa
    Women owning in partnership with women
    Couples selling directly to couples
    Women owning with husbands
    Women owning with husbands and others
    Women owning with men (brothers, fathers, general – not husbands)
    Women apparently “staking” planters, traders and mariners to build ships
    Women as navigators
    Women as captains and mates
    Women as shipbuilders
    Hints of scandal involving women’s ships
    Women property owners, by purchase and inheritance, including married women
    Some will ask the question: Why did women own ships? But the counter-question, based on the evidence, is equally relevant: Why not? There was a natural transition from owning property to owning a family fishing business to owning small boats for an inshore fishery to owning ships for fishing, trading and sea-going ventures and to buying shares in ships for profit-making. Perhaps it all began with “the first woman” inheriting a ship through her husband who drowned at sea, and realizing that the family business must continue for the survival of her own children, and knowing that she has the schooling to keep the books andmarket the fish and the knowledge and experience to cure it for the greatest profit. She keeps her ship and operates her business successfully and proves to other women that it can be done.
    Perhaps there were almost as many reasons for women owning ships as there were women involved in the business. Fathers, seeing their daughters’ potential for life on the sea, encouraged them and even on occasion put their daughters’ careers ahead of their sons’. Husbands and families needed the expertise and the labour of wife and mother, so she became involved in the family enterprise in order to ensure survival. There is evidence, too, that some women were role models for other women, and this is particularly apparent in some south coast communities of Newfoundland, where there were concentrations of women shipowners, and at Saint John, New Brunswick, where women modeled share-purchasing for succeeding generations. The women of New Brunswick were daring speculators. Their money was almost always invested in new large ships, and many of these were built to be sailed across the ocean to Europe and sold for a